REVIEW / How do the French kick off a new festival? With the S.F. Ballet.

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2005-07-13 04:00:00 PDT Paris -- The San Francisco Ballet is currently gracing a temporary outdoor stage at the Hôtels de Rohan-Soubise, home of the French national archives in Paris, as the sole attraction of a new open-air arts festival, Les Etés de la Danse de Paris. The organizers could hardly have chosen a more elegant showcase for alfresco culture: The public passes through a small formal garden surrounded by a colonnade to reach seats in an adjoining courtyard, where the 18th century building's classical facade serves as the backdrop for every ballet.

Hoping to attract Parisians as well as tourists, the festival intends to devote each annual season to a single company, choreographer or renowned artist. Its choice of the San Francisco Ballet for the inaugural event, July 5- 23, attests to the troupe's superb international reputation, and the tantalizing mixture of established classics and unfamiliar titles on the three programs has provoked such interest that roughly 13,000 tickets, half of the total available for all 13 performances, had been sold by opening night.

To launch the visit with a bang, the company's artistic director, Helgi Tomasson, boldly commissioned three new works for the first program, leaving the full-evening "Don Quixote" for the end of the engagement. Ideally, the audience would enjoy every performance under a cloudless sky. In fact, squally bursts of wind and drizzle ruffled the atmosphere on opening night, but they failed to dampen the public's enthusiasm or the dancers' commitment.

Matching the seasonal occasion, Paul Taylor's "Spring Rounds," his first creation for the company, floated in Jennifer Tipton's dappled lighting as lightly as a flirtation. Dressed in gauzy lemon and lime chiffon, bright as sunshine and cool as sorbets, the dancers bubbled with good cheer and tender intimacy, threading passages of solitary rumination through their gaiety and mutual delight.

Tossing one buoyant image after another to Richard Strauss' lush Divertimento for small orchestra, Op. 86 (after Couperin), Taylor combined social dancing and playground games to evoke the essence of innocent romance. As pretty as a spring day, this piece is an attractive addition to the repertory that will only improve as the dancers continue to perform it.

Unfortunately, Lar Lubovitch's first creation for this troupe, "Elemental Brubeck," has a lot less to recommend it. Slick, predictable and repetitive, it uses portions of the 1963 jazz suite "Time Changes," by the Dave Brubeck Quartet as the springboard for a swinging celebration of 1960s teenagers that says nothing much about them.

Extensive experience in ballet and modern dance -- and with movies and Broadway musicals -- has honed Lubovitch's choreographic facility, but he has not developed his own style. He has produced a generic jazz ballet, similar in tone to the "Dance at the Gym" in "West Side Story," but without its focus or urgency. Led by the ebullient Gonzalo Garcia, the ensemble wriggled and bopped insouciantly, taking the needlessly elaborate lifts and awkward changes of pace in stride and imposing some character on the vacuous jollity.

In the only absorbing passages, during a bluesy sextet, Lubovitch presented several views of a single pose or phrase at once, assigning it simultaneously to one dancer, to another with a partner and to a third lifted midair. Though this is not a particularly original device, it briefly raised the work above banality and justified our attention.

Time will tell if Christopher Wheeldon's "Quaternary" will surpass the success of his three previous works for the company. Whatever its future, it is a creation of striking ingenuity that transforms meticulously organized abstract movement into a Rubik's cube of geometric principles. The four contrasting sections, named for the seasons and respectively set to music by John Cage, J.S. Bach, Aarvo Pärt and Steven Mackey, differ dramatically, but their contrasting nature conjures a mysterious tension that permeates the whole piece.

The angular, razor-sharp shapes of the first section, Winter, yielded without warning to the tidal, canonical patterns of Spring, in which a quartet of dancers melted repeatedly into a single, flowing unit. As they slipped away, a couple embodying the languor of Summer replaced them. Part memory, part dream, the woman seemed eerily insubstantial against her partner's bare chest and solid presence.

As if fused by the air separating them, Muriel Maffre and Yuri Possokhov mirrored each other's movements uncannily, even facing in opposite directions, often with one standing and the other prone. In the wake of their riveting encounter, the Autumn section felt distinctly anticlimactic until the entire cast reassembled in overlapping groups, each reprising its characteristic material. Suddenly, a huge circle linked them all, erasing their differences. Just as suddenly, most of the dancers were gone, and those remaining turned their backs and walked slowly into the darkness upstage, leaving the audience breathless and longing for more.